Chapter 10

Commies, Kidnaps and Chaos

'The United States Government at this time [1950] attempted to monopolize
all his researches and force him to work on a project "to make man more
suggestible" and when he was unwilling, tried to blackmail him by ordering him
back to active duty to perform this function. Having made many friends he was
able to instantly resign from the Navy and escape this trap. The Government
never forgave him for this and soon began vicious, covert international
attacks upon his work, all of which were proven false and baseless.' (What
is Scientology?, 1978)

* * * * *

California, ever enchanted by fads and facile philosophies, was the natural
habitat of Dianetics and it was to California that Hubbard returned in triumph
at the beginning of August 1950, to be feted by joyful Dianeticists waiting to
meet him at Los Angeles airport. Two years earlier, he had left as a penniless
pulp fiction author; now he was back as a celebrity with a book firmly lodged
at the top of every bestseller list and a growing legion of followers who
truly believed him to be a genius.

He had a busy schedule ahead: apart from personal appearances and
interviews, he was to lecture at the newly-formed Hubbard Dianetic Research
Foundation of California, all the big bookstores wanted him for signing
sessions and, most important of all, he was to attend a rally on Thursday 10
August at the Shrine Auditorium. It promised to be Dianetics' finest hour, for
on that evening the identity of the world's first 'clear' was to be announced.

The Shrine was a vast, mosque-like building with white stucco castellated
walls and a dome in each corner, unforgettably characterized by the music
critic of the LA Times as being of the 'neo-penal Bagdad' school of
architecture. Built in 1925 by the Al Malaikah Temple, it was the largest
auditorium in Los Angeles and could seat nearly 6500 people under a swooping
ceiling designed to resemble the roof of a tent. When the Hubbard Dianetic
Research Foundation booked it for the meeting on 10 August, few people
expected more than half the seats to be filled.

Arthur Jean Cox, the young teletype operator who had met Hubbard at the Los
Angeles Science Fantasy Society, left early for the meeting by streetcar and
was surprised how crowded it was. 'More and more people got on at every stop,'
he said. 'I couldn't believe that everyone was going to the meeting but
when we arrived at the Shrine on Royal Street, everyone got off. I was
absolutely amazed. By the time I got inside there were only a few seats
left.'[1]

The audience was predominantly young, noisy and good-humoured. Many people
carried well-thumbed copies of 'The Book', in the hope of getting them signed
by Hubbard, and there was much speculation about 'the world's first clear' and
what he or she would be able to do. Dozens of newspapers and magazines,
including Life, had sent reporters and photographers to cover the event
and those cynics who had predicted a sea of empty seats looked on in
astonishment as even the aisles began to fill.

When L. Ron Hubbard walked on to the stage, followed by A. E. van Vogt,
whom he had recently recruited, and other directors of the Foundation, there
was a spontaneous roar from the audience, followed by applause and cheering
that continued for several minutes. Hubbard, totally assured and relaxed,
smiled broadly as he looked around the packed auditorium and finally held up
his hands for silence.

The meeting opened with Hubbard demonstrating Dianetic techniques. With the
help of a pretty blonde, he showed how to induce Dianetic reverie and then he
'run a grief incident' on a girl called Marcia. While the audience obligingly
responded when Hubbard spread his arms for applause at the end of each
demonstration, it all seemed a little too well rehearsed and there was a
murmur of approval when someone stood up in the audience and called out:
'Ladies and gentlemen, somehow I can't help but feel that all this has been
pre-arranged.'

Immediately people began shouting for Hubbard to demonstrate on someone
from the audience and when a young man jumped on to the piano in the orchestra
pit, a chant went up: 'Take him! Take him!' Hubbard, not in the
least flustered by this turn of events, invited him up on to the stage. The
young man introduced himself as an actor whose father had studied with Freud,
which fortuitously gave Hubbard the opportunity of mentioning his own
connection with the great analyst, through his old friend 'Snake' Thompson.

Sitting on facing chairs at the front of the stage, Hubbard made a
determined attempt to audit the man, but he proved an unresponsive subject,
answering almost every question in the negative. The audience soon became
bored and restless and began calling, 'Throw him out, throw him out!' Hubbard,
perhaps somewhat relieved, shook the man's hand and he stepped down.

_______________1. Interview with Cox and letter to Martin Gardner, 30 April 1952

The atmosphere throughout had remained perfectly cordial, even if the
shouted comments from the audience were increasingly irreverent. When Hubbard
was explaining the multitude of mental and physical benefits arising from
successful auditing, someone yelled, 'Are your cavities filling up?' and
caused a good deal of laughter.

As the highlight of the evening approached, there was a palpable sense of
excitement and anticipation in the packed hall. A hush descended on the
audience when at last Hubbard stepped up to the microphone to introduce the
'world's first clear'. She was, he said, a young woman by the name of Sonya
Bianca, a physics major and pianist from Boston. Among her many newly acquired
attributes, he claimed she had 'full and perfect recall of every moment of her
life', which she would be happy to demonstrate. He turned slowly to the wings
on one side of the stage and said: 'Will you come out now please, Sonya?'

The audience erupted once more in applause as a thin, obviously nervous,
girl stepped out of the wings and into a spotlight which followed her to
centre stage, where she was embraced by Hubbard. In a tremulous voice she told
the meeting that Dianetics had cleared up her sinus trouble and cured her
'strange and embarrassing' allergy to pain. 'For days after I came in contact
with paint I had a painful itching in my eyebrows,' she stammered. 'Now both
conditions have cleared up and I feel like a million dollars.' She answered a
few routine questions from Hubbard, who then made the mistake of inviting
questions from the audience: they had clearly been expecting rather more
spectacular revelations.

'What did you have for breakfast on October 3 1942?' somebody yelled. Miss
Bianca understandably looked somewhat startled, blinked in the lights and
shook her head. 'What's on page 122 of Dianetics, The Modern Science of
Mental Health?' someone else asked. Miss Bianca opened her mouth but no
words came out. Similar questions came thick and fast, amid much derisive
laughter. Many in the audience took pity on the wretched girl and tried to put
easier questions, but she was so terrified that she could not even remember
simple formulae in physics, her own subject.

As people began getting up and walking out of the auditorium, one man
noticed that Hubbard had momentarily turned his back on the girl and shouted,
'OK, what colour necktie is Mr Hubbard wearing?' The world's first 'clear'
screwed up her face in a frantic effort to remember, stared into the hostile
blackness of the auditorium, then hung her head in misery. It was an awful
moment.

Hubbard, sweat glistening in beads on his forehead, stepped forward and
brought the demonstration swiftly to an end. Quickwitted as always, he
proffered an explanation for Miss Bianca's

impressive lapses of memory. The problem, Dianetically speaking, was that
when he called her forward, asking her to come out 'now', the 'now' had frozen
her in 'present time' and blocked her total recall. It was not particularly
convincing, but it was the best he could do in the circumstances.

Forrie Ackerman, who was at the Shrine that night to see his client
perform, summed up the feelings of many people who were there: 'I was somewhat
disappointed not to see a vibrant woman in command of herself and situation.
She certainly was not my idea of a "clear".'[2]

It would be some time before Hubbard produced another 'Clear' although his
followers, in their enthusiasm, would frequently declare that their own
protégés had reached that blissful state. One of these was a
fifteen-year-old girl of such remarkable powers that she was said to have made
her bad teeth fall out and grown new teeth in their
place.[3] But no one suggested presenting her at a
public meeting.

The débâcle at the Shrine was no more than a hiccup in the
rising fortunes of L. Ron Hubbard. When, after the meeting, Ackerman called on
his client in his suite at the Frostona Hotel in Los Angeles, Hubbard clapped
him on the shoulder and boomed happily: 'Well, Forrie, I'm dragging down Clark
Gable's salary.'

It was true: money was literally pouring in. For the first few weeks after
van Vogt agreed to take over as head of the Los Angeles Foundation, he
recalled doing little but tear open envelopes and pull out $500 cheques from
people who wanted to take an auditor's course.[4]
Only a few days after the Shrine meeting, the Foundation moved its
headquarters into the former official mansion of the governor of California, a
sprawling building shaded by palm trees on the corner of South Hoover and
Adams, known as the 'Casa' because of its Spanish appearance. Although it cost
$4.5 million, enough money had already come in for a down payment. Other
branches of the Foundation had opened in New York, Washington DC, Chicago and
Honolulu.

But while money was pouring in, it was also pouring out and there was no
accounting, no organization, no financial strategy or control. 'One day the
bank manager called me,' said van Vogt. 'He told me Mr Hubbard was in the
front office and wanted to draw a cashier's cheque for $56,000 and was it all
right to give it to him. I said, "He's the boss."'

Trying to hold all the reins, refusing to delegate, Hubbard became ever
more authoritarian and suspicious of the people around him. 'He was having a
lot of political and organizational problems with people grabbing for power,'
said Barbara Kaye [not her real name], a public relations assistant at the Los
Angeles Foundation. 'He didn't trust anyone and was highly paranoid. He
thought the CIA had hit men

after him. We'd be walking along the street and I would ask, "Why are you
walking so fast?" He would look over his shoulder and say, "You don't know
what it's like to be a target." No one was after him: it was all delusion.'

Between his second and third marriages, Ron dallied with his public
relations assistant, luscious Barbara Kaye. She would soon conclude that he
was paranoid.

Barbara Kaye knew a lot about Ron's problems because she was having an affair
with him. She was just twenty years old, an exceptionally pretty blonde and a
psychology major. 'I wanted to get into public relations and an employment
agency sent me along to the Foundation. They were looking for someone to
answer the scurrilous attacks that the Press was making on Dianetics. Ron
interviewed me for the job and hired me straight away.

'My first impression was of a husky, red-haired man with a full, flabby
face - not by any means what one would call handsome. If I'd seen him on the
street I wouldn't have given him a second look, but I soon learned he was a
very creative, intelligent and articulate individual. He had a marvellous
personality and was very dynamic. There was a lot going on in the office at
that time and sometimes when I worked late he took me home. One night he
kissed me and, well, one thing led to another. That's how it all started. I
knew he was married, but I was very young at the time and not as concerned
with other men's wives as perhaps I should have been.'

It was an affair squeezed into a hectic timetable. Hubbard was lecturing at
the Foundation every day, seven days a week. A. E. van Vogt, who had
temporarily abandoned science-fiction writing, got up at 5.30 each morning to
drive down to the Casa to open the office. Hubbard arrived an hour later and
chaired a daily meeting of the staff instructors, most of whom had received
their initial training in Elizabeth, New Jersey. At eight o'clock the first
students arrived. Hubbard lectured from eight to nine and demonstrated from
nine to ten.

'We had an auditorium that could seat 500 people,' said van Vogt, 'but the
lectures were always crowded. You see there was nothing available for ordinary
people at that time in the way of therapy. Analysts were a lost cause because
they were already charging too much and we offered a complete course for
$500. What sticks in my mind was how fluently Ron talked off the top of his
head. Every morning it was something different. It amazed me. Where had it all
come from? That was the question in my mind. The only thoughts I ever got from
Ron were that he had observed things they were doing in China and thought they
were pretty good. I think he modified Chinese ideas.'

When he was not lecturing in the evenings, Hubbard spent his time with
Barbara, who soon found herself hopelessly in love. She was thrilled when he
rented a 'love nest' apartment for them at the Chateau

Marmont Hotel, a fake castle on a hill overlooking Sunset Strip which was a
favourite haunt of movie stars. The first night they spent there together, Ron
seemed to want to reassure her of the permanence of their relationship. He put
his arm round her shoulders and took her through the apartment. 'This is your
closet,' he said, 'this is your dressing-table, this is your toothbrush
. . .' Barbara was deeply touched.

Two days later, Sara and the baby arrived in town from the East Coast and
moved into the love nest. When Barbara turned up for work at the Foundation
next morning, she found her toothbrush on her desk, along with the few
personal possessions she had left at the apartment. While she stood staring at
the pathetic little bundle with tears welling in her eyes, Hubbard came over
and hissed his apologies, whispered that his wife was a 'bitch' and that there
was nothing he could do. 'I miss you,' he croaked. Then, to Barbara's
amazement, he asked her if she would like to have dinner with him and Sara
that evening. Speechless, she could do no more than shake her head.

Despite the hurt, Barbara could not bring herself to break off the
affair. 'I was completely infatuated. I remember I said to my room-mate - we
had a small apartment in Beverly Hills - "If I ever tell you I am marrying
this guy I want you to tie me up and not let me out of the door because he's a
lunatic." But I didn't trust myself not to do it because I was so enchanted by
him. Being with him was like watching a fascinating character playing a role
on a stage. I was never bored with him. He was a magical, delightful man, a
great raconteur, very bright and amusing and a very gentle, patient and sweet
lover.

'At the same time I recognized early on that he was also deeply
disturbed. Some of the things he told me were really bizarre, but I never knew
what to believe. He said his mother was a lesbian and that he had found her in
bed with another woman and that he had been born as the result of an attempted
abortion. He talked a lot about his grandfather who could really hold his
liquor and played a fiddle with the head of a negro carved on the end, but he
never talked about his father and never once mentioned he had children. I did
not know he had a son until I read it in the newspapers years later.'

Towards the end of September, Barbara accompanied Hubbard on a lecture tour
in the San Francisco area in her capacity as public relations officer of the
Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation. To her acute embarrassment, Sara came to
see them off at Union Station and ostentatiously kissed her husband goodbye,
at the same time sweeping her eyes up and down Barbara's figure. Hubbard, too,
was discomforted and drank a great deal in the club car of the train as it
rattled north.

His spirits improved greatly when they arrived in San Francisco and he
discovered that a welcoming barbecue party had been arranged at the home of a
local Dianeticist. Barbara, however, had an unhappy time - during the course
of the evening she wandered into the kitchen and found Hubbard kissing his
host's wife. Later that evening when she refused to sleep with him he lost his
temper and bellowed, 'They're all against me!' That night, Barbara wrote in
her diary: 'I see him now as vain, arrogant, self-centred and unable to
tolerate any frustration.'

They soon made it up, as a subsequent passage in her diary recorded:
'Things were better in Oakland. He took a penthouse apartment, I was with him
constantly and he fell in love with me a little again and I felt closer to him
than ever. He drank excessively and talked in proportion to his intake.
Grotesque tales about his family mostly and his hatred of his mother, who he
said was a lesbian and a whore . . . He is a deeply unhappy man. He
said the only thing to show him affection for the last few years, before he
met me, was Calico, his cat.'[5]

In October, Hubbard returned to the East Coast for a few days and was
greeted at Elizabeth with the news that the Foundation was approaching a
financial crisis - its monthly income could no longer even cover the payroll -
and Joseph Winter, the man who had done so much to validate Dianetics, was
about to resign.

Winter was deeply disillusioned with the Hubbard Dianetic Research
Foundation. He no longer believed that Dianetics was free from risk - two
pre-clears had developed acute psychoses during auditing - and he was
extremely worried by the Foundation's continuing willingness to accept anyone
for training as an auditor.

'People had breakdowns quite often,' said Perry Chapdelaine, a Sears
Roebuck clerk from Mason City, Iowa, who was a student at Elizabeth. 'It was
always hushed up before anyone found out about it. It happened to a guy on my
course, a chemical engineer. They wanted to get him out of the school and I
volunteered to stay with him in an adjoining building. He never slept or ate
and was in a terrible state, no one could do anything with him and in the end
they took him off to an asylum.'[6]

Apart from what he considered to be inherent dangers in allowing anyone to
audit anyone, Winter had also begun to doubt whether the state of 'clear' was
realistically obtainable. Finally, he was frustrated by the fact that the
Research Foundation was making absolutely no attempt to conduct any serious
scientific research, which was one of its avowed aims. He had voiced his
growing concern on several occasions, only to be airily dismissed by Hubbard.
It became clear to Winter that he had no alternative but to
resign.[7]

Art Ceppos was largely in sympathy with Winter and also submitted his
resignation. Hubbard's reaction was typically immoderate. Angry and bitter at
what he considered to be a betrayal by two of his earliest supporters, he
spread the word that Winter and Ceppos had been plotting to seize control of
the Foundation and had consequently been 'forced' to
resign.[8]

It was not Hubbard's style to be satisfied with simply blackening the
reputation of his enemies - he wanted revenge. An opportunity presented
itself in the unlovely form of Senator Joe McCarthy, the self-seeking
demagogue who, in February 1950, had accused the State Department of being
riddled with Communists and Communist sympathizers. The atmosphere of fear and
suspicion generated during the witch-hunts that followed cast a shadow across
America; almost nothing was worse, during the era of McCarthyism, than to be a
'Commie', or be thought to be a 'Commie'. On 3 November 1950, the
general counsel of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation in Elizabeth
contacted the FBI and said that Art Ceppos, president of Hermitage House, was
a Communist sympathizer who had recently tried to get hold of the Foundation's
mailing list of sixteen thousand names which would be 'valuable to anyone
interested in circulating Communist party
literature'.[9]

Hubbard stayed less than a week in Elizabeth and made little attempt to
resolve the financial crisis facing the Foundation. He had absolutely no
interest in balance sheets and operated on the optimistic, if unrealistic,
belief that somehow everything would come out all right in the end. Further
problems, of a more personal nature, arose when he returned to Los Angeles: he
began to suspect his wife was having an affair. One evening he had insisted on
an outlandish double date with his wife and his lover. Barbara, who hated the
idea, reluctantly showed up to meet Ron and Sara at a Los Angeles restaurant
in the company of Miles Hollister, one of the instructors from the LA
Foundation. 'I think Sara must have known what was going on,' said
Barbara. 'She was very hostile. At one point in the evening we were talking
about guns and she said I looked like the type to carry a Saturday night
special.'

The dinner party back-fired on Hubbard - his lover's date became his wife's
lover. Miles Hollister was twenty-two years old, tall, dark-haired and
strikingly handsome, a graduate of Bard College in New York State, where he
had been president of the student body, and a sportsman of some repute - he
was the first man to land a swordfish off the coast of Florida using light
tackle. In short, he was everything that Hubbard was not: young, attractive,
sporting and well-connected. It was hardly surprising that Hubbard conceived a
passionate loathing for the young man and predictable that he would

retaliate. His first move was curiously elliptical - he summarily fired two
of Hollister's closest friends at the Foundation, claiming they were
Communists.

Jack Horner, who was by then working at the Los Angeles Foundation,
attempted to intervene on their behalf. 'They were both nice guys and highly
trained instructors and I tried to get them off the hook. I went and
confronted Hubbard in his office and said, "You can't fire those guys, you
don't have any evidence." He ranted and raved, pacing up and down, and said,
"You don't understand. I'm fighting a battle here. I might lose some people on
the way, but I'm going to win."

'Hubbard was willing to do anything, for him it was any means to an end. A
couple of weeks later he got mad at a fellow named Charlie Crail, who had
helped set up the LA organization. They had some disagreement about how the
place should be run. He called me and another guy into his office and told us
to go and steal Charlie's Dianetics certificates. We told him we wouldn't do
it and that he shouldn't count on us for that kind of operation. He couldn't
understand it. As far as he was concerned, because he had signed the
certificates they belonged to him. There were lots of incidents like that, but
I was usually prepared to go along with them because I felt his genius far
outshone his craziness.'[10]

With his suspicions festering, Hubbard's relationship with Sara
deteriorated rapidly. One night they had a violent row and Sara shouted at
him, 'Why don't you just go off and spend the weekend with some pretty girl!'
Hubbard stormed out of the house, picked up Barbara Kaye and drove to a motel
in Malibu, where he spent much of the weekend moodily swigging whisky.

'He was very down in the dumps about his wife,' said Barbara. 'He told me
how he had met Sara. He said he went to a party and got drunk and when he woke
up in the morning he found Sara was in bed with him. He was having a lot of
problems with her. I remember he said to me I was the only person he knew who
would set up a white silk tent for him. I was rather surprised when we were
driving back to LA on Sunday evening, he stopped at a florist to buy some
flowers for his wife.'

Barbara kept a meticulous diary in which she constantly analyzed and
re-analyzed her affair with Hubbard, speculated on his mental condition and
recorded day-to-day drama. On Monday 27 November, she noted that Hubbard burst
into her office that morning 'tremendously emotionally disturbed'. Sara had
tried to commit suicide over the weekend by taking sleeping pills, he said,
after Barbara had spoken to her on the telephone. He assumed Barbara had told
her about their affair.

It was not true. Barbara had telephoned to speak to Hubbard about
Foundation business and had only exchanged a few words with Sara after
learning Ron was not at home. Hubbard would not believe it: he had audited
Sara and 'recovered an engram' indicating that her suicide attempt was
triggered by Barbara's telephone call.

An argument inevitably followed and Barbara reconstructed the extraordinary
'highlights' in her journal, very much as if she was writing a pulp romance:

'ME: You make a habit of instilling engrams, too, don't
you? That's fine. That's good behaviour for the founder of Dianetics.
HE: Isn't it exciting for you being a pawn on such a grand
chess board? You are playing for the world. Can you think of anything more
exciting?
ME: I don't give a good God damn about the world. I want a
single, gratifying, human relationship.
HE: You couldn't have one. You're an ambitious woman. You
crave power. You're a Marie Antoinette, a Cleopatra, a Lucretia Borgia
. . . you must have a Caesar or an Alexander.
ME: No, I don't need a Caesar, though Caesar may need me. I
know you now, Ron, and at this moment am closer to you than anyone has ever
been.
HE: (Head hung low) And knowing me you don't care for me
any more.
ME: I care for you in a different, new and exciting way.
(He put his hands on my shoulders and drew me to him.)
HE: I shouldn't do this. (He kissed me.)
ME: You still care for me.
HE: How do you know?
ME: You can't find your hat. You're distracted.
HE: That makes you feel powerful, doesn't it?
ME: It makes me aware of something interesting. You still
want me.
HE: Why?
ME: Because you need me. You need me more than I need you.
HE: In 1939 I was very much in love with a girl. She felt
that way too. When I knew she had a boyfriend coming up, I waited on the
stairway with a gun, just for a moment. Then I said they are flies. I realized
who and what I was and left. I told her I would leave her free to marry a
sharpie with a cigar in his mouth from Muncie, Indiana. Would you like to be
left free?
ME: The alternative is a sharpie with a Kool cigarette from
Elizabeth, New Jersey.
HE: That was unwise, very unwise, of you to say that.'

Barbara discovered just how unwise it was when, two days later, she received a
terse message via Western Union: 'Would advise you to

forget all about me and the Foundation - Ron.' 'I was in shock,' she
recalled. 'Here was the man I was supposed to be having a great love affair
with telling me I was fired.'

A.E. van Vogt, meanwhile, was striving to keep the Los Angeles Foundation
in business. He calculated that the six Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundations
had spent around one million dollars and were more than $200,000 in debt. At
the beginning of November, while Hubbard was away on the East Coast, van Vogt
cut the staff of sixty by half in an attempt to stay solvent. Hubbard was
furious and began hiring indiscriminately the moment he returned: within a
week, the payroll was back up to sixty-seven people. Van Vogt remonstrated,
but Hubbard insisted that the extra staff was needed for research. 'Financial
disaster was inevitable,' said van Vogt.[11]

One of the research projects about which Hubbard was very excited was the
aptly named 'GUK' programme. 'GUK' was a haphazard cocktail of benzedrine,
vitamins and glutamic acid which Hubbard believed facilitated auditing. 'I
recall Ron telling a meeting about this great breakthrough in Dianetics,' said
Forrest Ackerman. 'He said he had discovered a chemical way to audit yourself
called GUK. It comprised huge quantities of vitamins which you took every two
hours for at least twenty-four hours. If you took enough, he said, it would
release the engrams within you without the need for a partner.

'The Foundation rented a huge complex on Rossmore near Beverly and loads of
Dianeticists were holed up there going through the GUK programme but it didn't
last too long - I think it was a dead end.'

In December, Look magazine published a scathing article under the
headline 'Dianetics - Science or Hoax?' The text left the reader in little
doubt as to which the magazine thought it was. 'Half a million laymen have
swallowed this poor man's psychiatry . . .' it began. 'Hubbard has
demonstrated once again that Barnum underestimated the sucker birth rate.'
The tens of thousands of people who had swallowed Hubbard's doctrine were
characterized as 'the usual lunatic fringe types, frustrated maiden ladies who
have worked their way through all the available cults, young men whose
homosexual engrams are all too obvious . . .' The article referred
to the 'awe, fear and deep disgust' with which the medical profession viewed
Dianetics and quoted a doctor at the famous Menninger Clinic in Topeka,
Kansas, who conceded that sufferers from mental malaise might find temporary
relief from 'Dianetic hocus pocus' just as they sometimes do from hypnotism or
voodoo. 'But,' he added, 'the greatest harm to a person would come not because
of the vicious nature of Dianetic therapy but because it will lead them away
from treatment which they may badly need.'

Hubbard's primary attraction, Look concluded, was that his ersatz
psychiatry was available to all. 'It's cheap. It's accessible. It's a public
festival to be played at clubs and parties. In a country with only 6000
professional psychiatrists, whose usual consultation fees start at $15 an
hour, Hubbard has introduced mass-production methods. Whether such methods can
actually help you if you're sick is a moot point.'

As always in the face of an attack, particularly from the direction of the
despised media, committed Dianeticists closed ranks and there was no lack of
cheer at the LA Foundation's Christmas party, attended by staff and students
alike. Barbara Kaye turned up and was asked to dance by Hubbard. 'I need some
counselling, doctor, 'she whispered in his ear. 'What do you do with a
pre-clear who keeps dreaming she is in bed with you?' He grinned broadly and
replied, 'I have been thinking of beginning a series of empirical tests on the
result of substituting the reality for the dream.' Within a few days, their
affair resumed: on New Year's Eve, Hubbard missed the party he was supposed to
attend with Sara and spent the night with Barbara at her apartment on Dale
Drive in Beverly Hills.

In January 1951, the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners instituted
proceedings against the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation in Elizabeth,
accusing it of teaching medicine without a licence. The Foundation hired an
attorney who was confident he could defend the suit, but there was a strong
feeling among the directors that they should 'skip'; inquiries were instituted
to find a state where they would be more
welcome.[12] Hubbard, who clearly thought the
prospects in New Jersey looked bleak, asked two reliable students at Elizabeth
- John Sanborn and Greg Hemingway, the youngest son of the writer - to load
all his personal possessions into his black Lincoln limousine and drive it to
Los Angeles.

In the interim, perhaps still hoping to save his marriage, he persuaded
Sara and the baby to accompany him to Palm Springs, where he had rented a
single-storey adobe house with a small garden of flowering shrubs on Mel
Avenue. He wanted to get away from the distractions of Los Angeles, he
explained, to start writing a sequel to Dianetics. It was to be called
Science of Survival and would introduce faster, simplified auditing
techniques.

Richard de Mille and Barbara Kaye at the house in Palm Springs where
Hubbard plotted to kidnap his daughter Alexis.

Hubbard, Sara and Alexis were joined in Palm Springs by Richard de Mille, son
of the film director Cecil B. de Mille, who had recently been appointed
Hubbard's personal assistant. 'Although it never occurred to me at the time, I
think my name had something to do with it,' de Mille acknowledged. 'He liked
to collect celebrities. I had got into Dianetics as early as possible after
reading the article in Astounding and I was working at the LA
Foundation making publications out of Hubbard's lectures when he asked me to
go with him to Palm Springs.

'There was a lot of turmoil and dissension in the Foundation at the time;
he kept accusing Communists of trying to take control and he was having
difficulties with Sara. It was clear their marriage was breaking up - she was
very critical of him and he told me she was fooling around with Hollister and
he didn't trust her.'[13]

Predictably, Sara did not stay long in Palm Springs - the tension was more
than she could stand. Hubbard did not try to detain her and as soon as she and
Alexis had departed for Los Angeles, he sent a telegram to Barbara Kaye
telling her he loved her and needed her. She caught a bus for Palm Springs on
3 February and was met by Hubbard at the bus station. 'As he walked towards
me,' she said, 'I could see that he was ill.'

Kaye, who would later become a psychologist, said she made a clinical
diagnosis of Hubbard during the weeks they spent together in Palm
Springs. 'There was no doubt in my mind he was a manic depressive with
paranoid tendencies. Many manics are delightful, productive people with
tremendous energy and self-confidence. He was like that in his manic stage -
enormously creative, carried away by feelings of omnipotence and talking all
the time of grandiose schemes.

'But when I arrived he was in a deep depression. He had been totally unable
to work on his book, which had been originally scheduled for publication that
month. That's why he had called me - he was hoping I could help him get
through his writers' block. He was very sad and lethargic, lying around
feeling sorry for himself and drinking a great deal. Sometimes he would go to
the piano and fiddle around, improvising weird melodies of his own
composition. He thought that Sara had hypnotised him in his sleep and
commanded him not to write. He told me that the people in Elizabeth had tried
to "slip him a Mickey" in his glass of milk and another time they attempted to
insert a fatal hypo into his eye and heart to try and stop him from ever
writing again. Those were the engrams he was running.

'I tried to help him by using a technique I had learned at college,
breaking down the problem into small parts and presenting it a step at a
time. I got a block of butcher's paper and said to him, "Look, you don't have
to write. Just sit down at this table and look at the paper and when you don't
want to look at it any more, get up and leave." He sat there for ten minutes
on the first day and this went on for several days until one day he picked up
a pencil and began to write. Next day he was back at work, very excited and
enthused about what he was doing. He was singing and horsing around, talking,
laughing and discussing ideas in the kitchen until three o'clock in the
morning.'

One of Hubbard's favourite topics of conversation was psychiatrists. One
night over dinner at Mel Avenue, he told Barbara about an occasion when he had
demonstrated auditing techniques to a group

of psychiatrists and one of them had said to him, 'If you claim to cure
people by doing that, if you're not careful we'll lock you up.' He laughed
excessively, took a bite out of a chicken leg and spluttered, 'They called me
a paranoid, can you imagine it?' That night Barbara wrote in her diary: 'My
blood ran cold as he was saying that. It was all I could do to keep from
weeping.'

Barbara had been in Palm Springs for nearly three weeks when Ron began
fretting that 'something was brewing' in Los Angeles. He decided that they
should return immediately, even though the book was not yet finished.

'I didn't see him for a week after we got back,' Barbara said, 'then he
turned up at my place at about five o'clock one afternoon, very distraught and
pale, with his hair all over the place. He paced up and down in my room and
told me he had discovered Miles and Sara in bed together. He was afraid that
they were plotting with a psychiatrist in San Francisco to get him committed
to a mental institution. Sara had telephoned Jack Maloney, the general manager
in Elizabeth, and said a doctor had recommended he should be treated for
paranoid schizophrenia. He said he had found letters proving that Miles was
conspiring with Ceppos and Winter to get control of the Foundation. "Please
don't ask me anything," he said. "I'm in a very bad way. I'm going to the
desert for a few days alone. Things are very bad."'

Hubbard did not go off into the desert alone. He had other plans: he was
going to get Sara committed before she committed him. But first he had to
kidnap Alexis.

On the evening of Saturday, 24 February 1951, John Sanborn was babysitting
for eleven-month-old Alexis Hubbard at the Casa on Hoover and Adams in Los
Angeles. Several of the staff, Sanborn included, lived in one wing of the
building. Sanborn and Greg Hemingway used to hang around with Hank and Marge
Hunter, who worked in the research department; they'd usually eat together in
a little joint down the road called 'The Bread Line'. Marge, who was a friend
of Sara's, had a baby daughter the same age as Alexis and Sara occasionally
left Alexis with Marge when she wanted to go out.

This particularly Saturday evening, Sanborn was tired and when there was a
suggestion that they should all go to the movies, he offered to stay behind
and look after the kids. He had done it lots of times before, knew all about
changing nappies and giving them bottles. Marge was grateful and went off with
the others, happy to have a night out, leaving Sanborn in charge of her
daughter, Tam, and 'Lexie'.

At about eleven o'clock there was an urgent rapping at the door. Sanborn
opened it and found Frank Dessler, one of Hubbard's aides, standing on the
doorstep wearing a long topcoat and wide-brimmed

felt hat. His hands were thrust into his coat pockets in such a way that
Sanborn was positive he was carrying a gun. 'Mr Hubbard's coming,' Dessler
rasped. 'He's here to get Alexis.' Sanborn thought it was a hell of a time of
night to do it, but said nothing.

A few minutes later, Hubbard came in, also wearing a topcoat and felt
hat. 'We're just taking Alexis,' he said. Sanborn led the way to the room
where both children were sleeping. Hubbard leaned over and picked up a toy
from Alexis's crib. 'This hers?' he asked. Sanborn shook his head and Hubbard
threw it on the floor. While they were getting the baby's things together,
Sanborn started to say, 'Listen, if she wakes up in the night there's a
certain routine . . .' but Hubbard cut him short. 'I don't care
about that,' he snapped. 'We've got a nurse for her and we're taking her to
Palm Springs.' He picked Alexis out of her crib, still asleep, and hurried
away into the night.

Sanborn wondered idly what was going on, but he went to bed soon
afterwards. At one o'clock in the morning he was woken by someone shaking him
violently and he sat up with a start to find Miles Hollister standing over his
bed. If he had not been so sleepy, he would have laughed: Hollister, too, was
wearing a long topcoat and felt hat and also appeared to be carrying a gun.
'Where did Ron take Lexie?' he demanded. Sanborn rubbed his eyes and mumbled,
'Palm Springs.' 'When did they leave?' Hollister asked. It seemed that Sanborn
did nut respond quickly enough, for Hollister shouted 'When did they
leave?' Sanborn told him and he hurried out of the room. A few minutes
later, Sanborn heard Hollister revving his car outside.

Hollister headed out of town at high speed in the direction of Palm
Springs, which was exactly what Hubbard had intended him to do. By then,
Alexis had been handed over to the twenty-four hour Westwood Nurses Registry
in Los Angeles. Hubbard, posing as a businessman by the name of James Olsen,
had asked the agency to arrange for his child, Anne-Marie, to be put in the
care of a competent nurse for about a month because his wife had suddenly been
taken seriously ill and business commitments required him to leave immediately
for the East Coast. Melba McGonigel, the owner of the agency, was deeply
suspicious but agreed to take the baby after 'Mr Olsen' had signed a 'To whom
it may concern' statement releasing the agency of any responsibility.

Shortly after one o'clock on the morning of 25 February, a black Lincoln
drew up outside the Hubbards' apartment at 1251 Westmoreland Avenue in West
Los Angeles. Richard de Mille was at the wheel, Hubbard and Frank Dessler were
in the back. Inside the house, Sara sat in her nightgown by the telephone,
weeping into a handkerchief as she waited for news of Alexis. She jumped up in
alarm when she heard a key scraping at the door, but her fear turned to anger
when her

husband and Dessler appeared in the doorway. 'Where's Lexie?' she
screamed. Neither man said a word. They grabbed her by each arm, one of them
clamped a hand over her mouth and they bustled her out of the house, across
the sidewalk and into the back of the car, which drove off at speed.

Sara fought like a cat in the back of the car, screaming and shouting at
Hubbard, who in turn was shouting at her. At one point, when the car stopped
at traffic lights, she tried to leap out and thereafter Hubbard gripped her
round the neck in a stranglehold while the argument continued. 'She was
enraged at being hauled off and was fulminating insults in all directions,'
said de Mille. 'She was very bitter about their marriage and his conduct and
Ron was fulminating against Miles Hollister and her conduct.'

At Los Angeles city limit, Dessler was dropped off and the Lincoln sped on
towards San Bernardino, where Ron hoped to get Sara medically examined and
declared insane. 'She was eager to get the same opinion about him,' de Mille
declared, 'but Ron held all the cards at that point.' There followed a
ludicrous farce as they toured the dark streets of San Bernardino trying to
find a doctor while Sara alternately screamed at, and pleaded with, her
husband to tell her where he had taken Alexis. Eventually, Hubbard went into
the county hospital while de Mille guarded Sara in the car. He returned after
some few minutes, apparently surprised and disgusted that there was no doctor
available in the early hours of the morning willing to declare his wife
insane.

At dawn, the Lincoln could be seen trailing a cloud of dust as it headed
east across the desert towards the Arizona border; Hubbard had ordered de
Mille to drive to the airport at Yuma. The angry squabbling in the back of the
car had not let up for a moment. Sara swore again and again that she would
have Ron arrested for kidnapping the moment she was free and he swore that if
she did she would never see Alexis again. The mutual threats and
recriminations continued while Hubbard was thinking hard how he could
extricate himself from the situation.

Parked in the watery early morning sunshine in a quiet corner of Yuma
airport, the warring couple at last agreed on a temporary truce. Hubbard
promised to release Sara and tell her where Alexis was if she signed a piece
of paper saying that she had gone with him voluntarily. Sara tearfully signed
and Hubbard scribbled a note to Dessler: 'Feb. 25. To Frank - This will
authorize Sara to take Alexis to live with her when she has a house. L. Ron
Hubbard.' He jotted down the name of the agency he said was caring for Alexis
- 'Baby Sitters Inc, Hollywood phone book' - and added, 'Give Sara the baby's
address now so Sara can see her.'

Hubbard and de Mille got out of the car and Sara, still in her nightgown,
drove back to Los Angeles clutching the piece of paper she believed would
enable her to be re-united with her baby. But Hubbard had no intention of
permitting such a reunion. 'He believed that as long as he had the child he
could control the situation,' de Mille explained.

While Sara was on her way back to Los Angeles, Hubbard was standing in a
telephone booth at Yuma airport giving urgent instructions to Frank
Dessler. He was to arrange for Alexis to be collected from her nurse before
Sara got there. No matter what it cost, he was then to hire a reliable couple
to drive the baby to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where Hubbard would meet her.

It did not take long for Sara to discover that Ron had misled her but by
the time she had persuaded Dessler to reveal the baby's whereabouts it was too
late. She arrived at the Westwood nursery just two hours after Alexis had been
taken away. Sara filed a kidnapping complaint with Los Angeles police
department, but Hubbard was lucky - the police dismissed the incident as a
domestic dispute which was nothing to do with them.

Hubbard did not go directly to Elizabeth because he wanted to block any
further attempts Sara might make to have him committed. Accompanied by the
loyal de Mille, he caught a commuter plane to Phoenix and from there they flew
to Chicago, where Hubbard presented himself for examination by a psychiatrist
and a psychologist, both equally bemused.

'He wanted a testimonial from a professional who would say he was OK and
that he was not a paranoid schizophrene,' said de Mille. 'He and I went first
to a psychiatrist who didn't like the smell of it. He obviously thought he was
being manipulated, so we just paid him $10 and left. Then we went to a
prominent diagnostic psychologist of that era who did some projective testing
on Hubbard and produced an upbeat, harmless report, saying that he was a
creative individual upset by family problems and dissension and it was
depressing his work and so forth. It was very bland but Hubbard was delighted
with it. The main value of it to him was that it didn't say he was crazy, so
he could claim he had been given a clean bill of health by the psychiatric
profession.'

Before leaving Chicago, Hubbard called at the offices of the FBI to alert
them of his suspicions that one of his employees was a Communist. The man's
name, he was far from reluctant to reveal, was Miles
Hollister.[14] Hubbard and de Mille then flew to New
York and caught a taxi to Elizabeth, where the Hubbard Dianetic Research
Foundation was still in operation, although besieged by creditors. They
checked into a hotel and waited for Alexis to arrive.

_______________14. US Govt memo to Director FBI from SAC Chicago, 27 April 1951

While they were there, a further complication entered Hubbard's already
entangled private life: Polly Hubbard filed suit in Port Orchard, Washington,
for maintenance, alleging that her former husband had 'promoted a cult called
Dianetics', had authored a bestseller, owned valuable property and was well
able to afford payment of maintenance for his two children, Nibs, then
sixteen, and Katie, fifteen. Hubbard responded by claiming that his first wife
was not a fit and proper person to have control of the children because she
'drinks to excess and is a dipsomaniac'.

On 3 March 1951, Hubbard, in his role as patriotic citizen, wrote to the
FBI in Washington to provide the names and descriptions of fifteen 'known or
suspected Communists' within his organization. Heading the list were his wife
and her lover:

'SARA NORTHRUP (HUBBARD): formerly of 1003 S. Orange Grove Avenue,
Pasadena, Calif. 25 yrs. of age, 5'10", 140 lbs. Currently missing somewhere
in California. Suspected only. Had been friendly with many Communists.
Currently intimate with them but evidently under coercion. Drug addiction set
in fall 1950. Nothing of this known to me until a few weeks ago. Separation
papers being filed and divorce applied for.

'MILES HOLLISTER: Somewhere in the vicinity of Los Angeles. Evidently a
prime mover but very young. About 22 yrs, 6', 180 lbs. Black hair. Sharp chin,
broad forehead, rather Slavic. Confessedly a member of the Young Communists.
Center of most turbulence in our organization. Dissmissed [sic] in
February when affiliations discovered. Active and dangerous. Commonly armed.
Outspokenly disloyal to the U.S.'

FBI director John Edgar Hoover replied promptly: 'I wish to thank you for
the information you have made available to this
Bureau.'[15]

Four days later, Hubbard kept an appointment, arranged at his request, with
an FBI agent from the Internal Security Section. His intention was to press
home his accusations against Hollister, as was evident from the agent's
report: 'Hubbard advised that he felt that Communists within his organization
were undermining its structure. He advised that he had turned over the names
of several suspected Communists to the FBI office in Los Angeles. Hubbard
could only recall the name of one of these individuals. He stated Miles
Hollister was one of the individuals he suspected of being Communistically
inclined. Concerning Hollister, Hubbard stated that he was instrumental in
driving Hubbard's wife, Sara Elizabeth Northrup, to the point of
insanity. Hubbard expressed considerable concern in connection with
Hollister's influence on his wife. He stated that his wife, as well as his
Army .45 automatic, had been missing for several days . . .'

Later in the interview, Hubbard disclosed that Russia was interested in his
work. 'Hubbard stated that he strongly feels that Dianetics can be used to
combat Communism. However, he declined to elaborate on how this might be
done. He stated that the Soviets apparently realized the value of Dianetics
because as early as 1938 an official of Amtorg, while at The Explorers Club in
New York, contacted him to suggest that he go to Russia and develop Dianetics
there.

'In an apparent attempt to give credence to his statements, Hubbard advised
that he was recently psychoanalyzed in Chicago and was found to be quite
normal . . .'[16] The FBI agent conducting
the interview could not agree: he concluded that Hubbard was a 'mental
case'.[17]

During his short stay in Elizabeth, Hubbard managed to alienate his old
friend and mentor, John W. Campbell, who resigned from the Foundation and thus
joined Hubbard's lengthening list of enemies. In Campbell's view, Hubbard had
become impossible to work with and was responsible for the ruinous finances
and complete disorganization throughout the Dianetics movement. (Dessler wrote
to Hubbard on 9 March to say that none of the staff at the LA Foundation had
been paid for more than two weeks, but Hubbard seemed unconcerned.)

Soon after Alexis arrived, Hubbard announced to de Mille that they were
going to go south, where it was warmer, so that he could continue with his
book. It had been snowing for weeks in Elizabeth and de Mille was not in least
the sorry to leave, even though Hubbard had made it clear that it would be his
responsibility to care for the baby.

They were unlikely fellow travellers: a large, forty-year-old man with a
florid complexion, flaming red hair and a Kool cigarette constantly between
his lips; his diminutive companion, twenty-nine years old, rather shy and very
much in awe of the older man; and a gurgling twelve-month-old baby in nappies
just learning to walk. The three of them arrived in Tampa, Florida, in the
middle of March. They took two rooms in a small hotel: Hubbard had a room to
himself, de Mille and the baby shared. 'It never crossed my mind that the baby
should go in with him,' said de Mille. 'He was the leader and I was the
follower. He gave the orders; I was privileged to serve.'

Hubbard pretended to look for property in Tampa, but de Mille noticed that
he seemed nervous and ill at ease much of the time. 'One evening I knocked on
his door and he opened it carrying a loaded .45 service automatic. I must have
looked a bit surprised because he said, "You shouldn't creep up on me like
that, Dick." I didn't even know he had a gun until that moment.'

way things feel around here. I want to go to a place where I can breathe
free. We're going to Havana.'

Havana in the early 'fifties, before Castro, was the fun capital of the
Western hemisphere - a corrupt, colourful, hedonistic, wide-open city where
tourists with money were guaranteed a good time. Americans did not even need a
passport to enter Cuba and no one raised an eyebrow at the two men who arrived
from Florida in the company of an apparently motherless baby. They took a taxi
downtown and checked into a hotel on the Paseo Marti, Havana's bustling main
street.

'Hubbard managed to rent a very old Spanish typewriter', de Mille recalled,
'and was madly banging away on it all night, while I was taking care of the
baby and trying to sleep with the water pipes rattling in the wall. After we
had stayed there a couple of nights, we went to a real estate agent and rented
a ground-floor apartment in the Vedado district, the Beverly Hills of Havana.
Once we had moved in, we hired two Jamaican women to look after Alexis, which
was a great relief to me.'

Comfortably installed in the apartment, Hubbard began working intensively
in his book, dictating into a recording machine. As was his usual habit, he
worked all night with little to sustain him but a bottle of rum, which was
usually empty by dawn.

In the afternoons, he would often sit and talk with de Mille. 'He talked
about himself a lot, but as is often true with that kind of person he didn't
really give me any confidences: he was telling me his story as he thought I
ought to know it. He told me about Jack Parsons and Aleister Crowley and all
that. He didn't take any responsibility for the black magic rituals and blamed
them on Parsons, but he admitted he was there.

'What I didn't understand about him at the time was his lack of personal
attachment. He thought people were there to be used, to serve the user and
didn't have any importance in their own right. I don't think he abducted
Alexis, for example, with any intention of keeping her; he was just using her
to keep control of the situation.

'When I first saw him at the meeting at The Shrine auditorium I was very
impressed. I thought he was a great man who had made a great discovery and
whatever his shortcomings they must be discounted because he had the
answer. He promised heaven. He said I have the key which can open the door, do
you want to go there? It did not matter that his qualifications were suspect;
he held the key. Actually, he was very widely read, a sort of self-made
intellectual. I don't think he did any research in the academic sense, but he
knew a lot about Freud, hypnosis, the occult, magic, etcetera, and Dianetics
grew out of that knowledge.

'I don't think Dianetics were necessarily successful because the time was
right. The time is never wrong for a cultist movement. People present new
ideas which they say are going to change the world and there are always a
certain number of people who believe them. Lenin was the Hubbard of
1917. Hubbard was the Madame Blavatsky of 1950.'

Hubbard's ability to concentrate on his work was subjected to a severe
setback when the American newspapers of Thursday 12 April arrived in
Cuba. Sara had at last blown the whistle and filed a writ at Los Angeles
Superior Court demanding the return of her child. The headlines told the
story: 'Cult Founder Accused of Tot Kidnap', '"Dianetic" Hubbard Accused of
Plot to Kidnap Wife', 'Hiding of Baby Charged to Dianetics Author'. Most
newspapers carried a picture of the distraught mother, smiling broadly.

After digesting this less than welcome news, Hubbard sat down and wrote a
letter to Sara. It was dated 15 April and contained all the pulp writer's
flair for fantasy:

'Dear Sara,

I have been in the Cuban military hospital and I am being transferred to
the United States next week as a classified scientist immune from interference
of all kinds.

Though I will be hospitalized probably a long time, Alexis is getting
excellent care. I see her every day. She is all is have to live for.

My wits never gave way under all you did and let them do but my body didn't
stand up. My right side is paralyzed and getting more so. I hope my heart
lasts. I may live a long time and again I may not. But Dianetics will last
10,000 years - for the Army and Navy have it now.

My Will is all changed. Alexis will get a fortune unless she goes to you as
she would then get nothing. Hope to see you once more. Goodbye - I love you.

Ron.

The next day, Hubbard marched into the US Embassy in Havana, insisted on
seeing the military attaché and asked for protection from Communists
who, he said, were trying to steal his research material. He appealed, as one
officer to another, for help. The attaché, clearly sceptical, murmured
something about 'seeing what he could do' and cabled the FBI in Washington for
'any pertinent information' about his wild-eyed visitor. Back came the reply
that Hubbard had been interviewed on 7 March last and that 'agent conducting
interview considered Hubbard to be mental case'.[17]

moving letter to Sara, nor indeed was he aware that Hubbard was interned in
a military hospital, but he certainly registered a drooping in his
spirits. 'He began to get very nervous again and complained that be wasn't
feeling well. He said he had to move downtown, so we broke our lease and moved
into the Packard Hotel, which faced the park and overlooked the entrance to
the harbour and the prison. There he proceeded to get sick. It was probably an
ulcer, but he said it was the result of pain-drug hypnosis which Sara and
Winter had done way back.'

The news from Los Angeles was not calculated to make him feel any
better. On 23 April, Sara filed for divorce, citing 'extreme cruelty, great
mental anguish and physical suffering'. Her allegations were
sensational. Apart froth charging Hubbard with bigamy and kidnapping, Sara
claimed he had subjected her to 'systematic torture, including loss of sleep,
beatings, and strangulations and scientific experiments'. Because of his
'crazy misconduct' she was in 'hourly fear of both the life of herself and of
her infant daughter, who she has not seen for two months'.

All the salacious details were included in the divorce complaint. While
they were living at the Chateau Marmont, Sara said Ron had told her he no
longer wanted to be married to her but did not want a divorce as it might
damage his reputation. His suggestion was that she 'should kill herself if she
really loved him'. Subsequently he prevented her from sleeping for a period of
four days and then gave her sleeping pills 'resulting in a nearness to the
shadow of death'.

Sara accused her husband of frequently trying to strangle her; on one
occasion, shortly before Christmas 1950, be had been so violent he ruptured
the Eustachian tube in her left car. The following month, at Palm Springs, he
had started his car in gear while she was getting out and knocked her to the
ground. As a result of Hubbard's behaviour, the divorce complaint continued,
the 'plaintiff and her medical advisers . . . concluded that said
Hubbard was hopelessly insane, and, crazy, and that there was no hope for said
Hubbard, or any reason for her to endure further; that competent medical
advisers recommended that said Hubbard be committed to a private sanatarian
for pshychiatric observation and treatment of a mental ailment known as
paranoid schizophrenia . . .'[18]

Caryl Warner, Sara's flamboyant Hollywood attorney, did his best to ensure
the case received maximum publicity. The reporters covering the Divorce Court
for the LA Times and the Examiner were both women and early
feminists. 'Before the case I made stare they knew what a bastard this guy
Hubbard was,' said Warner. 'I told them he was a sadist, that he'd kept his
wife awake for days and burned her

with cigarettes and that he was crazy, crazy like a fox. They could hardly
wait for me to file the complaint.

'I liked Sara and Miles a lot. They eventually married and got a house in
Malibu and we became friends; I remember they introduced me to pot. I believed
Sara absolutely; there was no question about the truth in my opinion. When she
first came to me with this wild story about how her husband had taken her baby
I was determined to help her all I could. I telephoned Hubbard's lawyer in
Elizabeth and warned him: "Listen, asshole, if you don't get that baby back
I'm going to burn you."'[19]

The first singe was inflicted by the damaging headlines in newspapers
across the country the day after the kidnapping complaint was filed on 11
April. (The only unforeseen setback to Warner's carefully laid plans was that
President Harry S. Truman inconveniently chose the same day to sack General
Douglas MacArthur for insubordination in Korea and thus rather hogged the
front page.) The divorce itself received more extensive coverage and was
better handled: the pictures of Sara smiling broadly were replaced by pictures
of her weeping pitifully and being comforted by her attorney.

In Cuba, Hubbard's condition regressed. 'I think what really caught up with
him,' said de Mille, 'was that he felt he was losing control of the
organization. That's what it amounted to.'

There was no question that Hubbard's fortunes had undergone a radical
revision in the twelve months since his emergence as the adored founder of
Dianetics. His personal life was in disarray, the Hubbard Dianetic Research
Foundations in Elizabeth and Los Angeles were disintegrating, most of the
money had somehow been frittered away, he was months behind with his second
book and he was stuck in Cuba with Alexis and he had no idea what to do with
her.

What he needed was a saviour, preferably a saviour with plenty of ready
cash. And there was one obvious candidate - Don Purcell, a businessman in
Wichita, Kansas. Mr Purcell was not only an enthusiastic Dianeticist, he also
happened to be a millionaire.

Towards the end of April, Hubbard sent a telegram to Purcell from Havana
saying he needed help. De Mille followed up with a long-distance telephone
call urging Purcell to 'do something' because Ron was dying. Purcell acted
without delay. He sent a private plane to Cuba with a registered nurse on
board to collect Ron and Alexis and bring them back to Kansas. (De Mille had
been instructed to stay behind and finish transcribing Ron's plastic recording
discs. )

As a follower of Dianetics, Purcell was delighted and honoured to be able
to play host to L. Ron Hubbard in Wichita. It was a pleasure that would be
short-lived.